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Journey-mapping approaches: 2 critical decisions to make before you begin.

June 14, 2020 2020-06-14

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Whether you’re attempting to address user-research goals, such as learning about a specific persona’s needs related to your product , or internal business goals, such as addressing lack of ownership over certain parts of the customer experience, journey mapping can be useful activity for bringing teams together to create one shared organization-wide vision for prioritizing design and UX ideas and investments.

Before jumping into your next journey map, however, do your due diligence to ensure that the mapping process will be productive. First and foremost, know and use the 5-step process for journey mapping and complete the premapping activities recommended: Before you even pick up a sticky note, establish a crossdisciplinary team of allies that will help socialize and create buy-in for your effort and that will determine and commit to the scope of the map upfront.

In This Article:

2 critical decisions to make before journey mapping, decision #1: will you create a current-state or future-state journey map, decision #2: will you use an assumption-first or research-first approach, recommendation: use a hybrid approach.

In addition to the invaluable premapping steps of establishing a team and determining the scope, there are 2 key decisions you must make before you begin the process:

• Will you map current -state or future -state experience?
• Will you begin with a research -first approach or an assumption -first approach?

The first decision determines the temporal state of the map (current or to-be). The second decision determines when and how resources and data will be gathered to shape the map. Answering these questions at the outset will focus the scope of the map, set the overall direction for the team’s activities, and eliminate snags in collaboration as the process advances.

The first decision: Is it more useful for your team to visualize the reality of the current-state experience with your company or product, or is it more useful to communicate an idealized future-state experience?

Current-state journey maps visualize the experience customers have when attempting to accomplish a goal with your product or company as it exists today.

Future-state journey maps visualize the best case, ideal-state journey for an existing product or a journey for a product that doesn’t exist yet.

When and How to Use Current-State Journey Maps

If you want to identify and document existing problems for customers and then determine relevant solutions, you’ll want to create a current-state journey map. It will enable you to understand user needs and find gaps in the current experience. A current-state map should emphasize current customer pain points, areas of disconnect in the journey, and overall dips and peaks in the user’s emotional journey. (Don’t forget about highlighting the good, as well!)

Use current-state maps to communicate and persuade: The output of current-state mapping initiatives can serve to convince additional stakeholders, product owners, or channel leads that pain points exist and to communicate the frequency and magnitude of those pain points. The contextual thoughts and user emotions contained in the map are especially helpful for creating a persuasive narrative that generates buy-in for activities and investments that will address the pain points.

Use current-state maps to provide shared understanding: Current-state maps also provide a cohesive launching point for UX and design activities. With a shared understanding of where the experience falls short, teams can move swiftly into brainstorming new interactions or flows because the problems are now well understood by everyone, and therefore more easily prioritized. Sketching or prototyping new design ideas is more productive with a well-understood current state.

Use current-state maps to generate additional user research: The current-state map can also serve as a foundation for further user research for journey mapping . Put current-state maps in front of customers to generate additional discussion and insights. While referencing the current-state map, ask open-ended questions about what does or does not align to their experiences, and have them react to the map. Update and evolve the map based on new findings.

When and How to Use Future-State Journey Maps

If you want to reinvent journeys for the better or conceive new experiences that meaningfully differentiate your company from competitors, try a future-state journey map. Future-state mapping helps you envision ways of supporting new customer segments or of creating and delivering new offerings.

Use future-state maps to create shared vision: When there is no existing product or offering, future-state maps can serve as a North Star that communicates the experience in its ideal form. This tool helps teams create a shared vision about what the experience should be like or even generate experience guidelines or principles to keep them aligned in their efforts. The process offers similar benefits for teams who want to completely reimagine an experience for an existing product or service instead of identifying and tweaking individual pain points.

Use future-state maps to provide direction: You can also think of the future-state map as a roadmap for teams creating a new product or experience. It can serve as a planning document for prioritizing the features, content, or service points that must exist in order to achieve the ideal experience reflected in the map.

Is it more feasible for your team to begin mapping with existing knowledge and validate (or invalidate ) that map later, or is it more valuable to conduct primary research upfront? In other words, will you begin your mapping initiative with an assumption-first or a research-first approach?

The assumption-first approach begins with a workshop where a crossfunctional team makes use of already existing knowledge in order to create an assumption map or hypothesis map.

The research-first approach begins with a period of primary user research led by the UX or design team; the research is later consolidated into a map.

When and How to Use an Assumption-First Approach

In an assumption-first approach, teams start with a 1–3-day journey-mapping workshop with stakeholders, create a draft of a hypothesis map, then validate or evolve what they have created with additional user research. The primary benefit of the assumption-first approach is that it provides an introduction to journey mapping to those who are unfamiliar with the process, helps gain buy-in, and aligns siloed team members. The risk is that the process often stops before validation occurs, with a hypothesis map being used to make critical decisions.

Before deciding on mapping from assumptions, assess your existing base of knowledge about users and their behaviors:

• How much knowledge do you have?
• How methodologically-sound was the data collection?
• How recent is the knowledge?
• How broad is the knowledge?
• How deep is the knowledge?

The more questions are answered positively, the lower the risk of proceeding with an assumption-first approach. (Conversely, if you have little existing knowledge, and it was collected with sloppy methodology long ago, and it is only broad but not deep — or only deep but not broad — then your risk will be high.)

Use an assumption-first approach to educate team members: If UX or CX maturity is especially low at your organization or within your department, you may need to focus energy on educating people about why you’d want to do journey mapping at all and helping everyone understand the process, first. By hosting a journey-mapping workshop to bring stakeholders together, the assumption-first approach provides an opportunity teach others about journey mapping by getting them directly involved.

Use an assumption-first approach to lower the entry barrier to mapping: The assumption-first approach enables you to make use of existing organizational knowledge. Often, you can expose pain points and gaps within the journey by simply bringing together what you already have, without having to win approval for a lengthy and expensive upfront research phase. Armed with some small wins from this approach, you may be better set up to secure additional support and budget to continue the process in a rigorous way.

Use an assumption-first approach to move quickly: If you have an imperative to innovate or to ideate new design ideas quickly, the assumption-first approach can accelerate the process of prioritizing pain points and generating solutions to test. Especially if stakeholders have research fatigue or aversion, use the assumption-first approach as a platform to bring together the deep but often disparate knowledge the team has and to avoid repeating studies that will reveal already known insights.

When and How to Use a Research-First Approach

In a research-first approach, journey mapping begins with an upfront period of primary user research in an attempt to gather new insights before mapping the customer journey. The obvious benefit of this approach is that it ensures mapping of primary data instead of stakeholder assumptions. However, this approach can be lengthy and expensive — involving phases for research, analysis, and stakeholder readouts — and it does not provide as much opportunity to bring people along for the process as the assumption-first approach does.

Use a research-first approach to provide rigor: If you are part of an organization where internal “anecdotes” and “assumptions” will be scoffed at and will not hold much weight, don’t create an assumption map. It may be better to invest time and energy upfront, securing buy-in and budget for user research that can be thoroughly conducted and analyzed and used to create the first edition of the map. If this is the case, make sure to include space in the timeline for frequent research readouts with the broader team. (In other words, don’t disappear into a research hole.)

Use a research-first approach for small-scale, contained projects: If the scope of your mapping initiative is small and contained enough, you may not need to get crossfunctional stakeholders involved in interactive collaboration. For example, if your team is focusing on a journey that falls solely within your product domain and you have the authority to make decisions and determine new design directions based on mapping outputs, you may not need to waste time with an unnecessary workshop . However, in the small number of cases where this is true, it is still beneficial to keep stakeholders in the know about the process and insights revealed during mapping, should you be questioned later about changes you wish to make.

As with any design project, there are tradeoffs involved with making these 2 critical decisions, and there are benefits and challenges for each path. Your team size, project budget, scope and timeline, team politics, and existing journey-mapping knowledge and experience should be factors in helping you pick the best approach.

For most teams, using a hybrid approach for each decision works well: Create a current-state map first, to understand existing opportunities, and then create a future-state map to envision new ideas in a holistic way. Use a hypothesis-first approach to build buy-in with stakeholders; then follow up with user research to validate or evolve assumptions and create a second version of the map integrating primary user research findings.

Here’s what this recommendation looks like in a high-level process:

• Start with what you already have, using the assumption-first approach. Create a current-state hypothesis map with crossfunctional stakeholders in order to understand existing opportunities.
• Perform additional user research, such as interviews , diary studies , or inviting customers into your workshop to react to the first draft of your map. Update and evolve your map based on new insights.
• Once the team is confident that the pain points and gaps within the journey are well understood, conduct a visioning exercise to create a future-state map that can serve as your North Star for optimizing the experience.

This process could be executed with a variety of activities, timelines, and executional formats depending on the factors listed above.

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Journey Mapping: 2 Decisions to Make Before You Begin

The 3 Competencies of Journey Management

Kim Salazar · 5 min

Journey Management vs. Service Design

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Types of User Pain Points

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Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

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Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners

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Ideas from future-state journey mapping

Pre-ideation.

Using one of service design’s classic experience ­visualization tools to generate ideas around experience and process.

01 See methods like Investigative rehearsal and Desktop walkthrough in #TiSDD 7.2, ­Prototyping methods, or the Bodystorming ­online method description.

02 This tip comes from Jürgen Tanghe. See more of his advice in #TiSDD Chapter 6, Ideation .

Teams can generate new ideas in a structured way by creating future-state journey maps. Starting with a current-state map, or using your research and experience, you create complete or partial new journey maps. On the way, you generate many individual ideas which may be diversified or prototyped. Use this with groups who are comfortable thinking in journeys and experiences. Working at the journey level lets you think about orchestration and expectations even at this early stage.

Step-by-step guide

• ‍Invite the right people to work beside your core team for the exercise (this might include people who know the background, people with no preconceptions, experts, representatives of the implementation team, people who will deliver the service, users, management, etc.).
• If you have some current-state journey maps, let the group familiarize themselves with them and, if practical and desirable, with the research behind them. If you don’t have current-state journey maps, use storytelling, based on the experience of the people in the room. Of course, this is more assumption-based, but it can be useful.
• Take one map at a time and use the best information you have to identify critical steps in the journey. You might refer to your research, especially verbatim statements from customers or emotional journeys which you have already plotted. You might look at jobs to be done (JTBD) and consider different ways to do the same job. If you do not have these resources yet, then step into the figurative shoes of your personas and talk your way through the maps, looking for frustrations and opportunities. You could even use a desktop walkthrough or act it out.  [01]
• Pin down some critical issues which need to be changed.
• Ideate around each of these points to look for alternatives. You could think about JTBD to open up your thinking away from the existing service model. Try other ideation methods, like brainwriting, 10 plus 10 sketching, or bodystorming. Record your insights, ideas, and any new questions. 
• Choose some of the most promising ideas, perhaps using a quick voting method. 
• Quickly draw some rough maps incorporating your new ideas. How do the changes affect the rest of the journey? How do the technology and process change? What about the experience and expectations? Use desktop walkthroughs or act it out, if that helps. Also, you might try a combination of different journeys.
• Identify the most interesting new journey features and incorporate them into one or more new maps to take forward, perhaps developing them into service blueprints to explore the frontline and backstage processes. Alternatively, go straight into prototyping these new journeys in more detail.

Method notes

• ‍As with all co-creative tools, the conversation around the tool is as important as what goes on the paper. Make sure the group keep notes.
• The use of customer journeys for ideating a future state is widespread, very popular, and has some clear benefits in terms of thinking in sequence and flows. However, we need to be aware of an important risk: working with customer journeys focuses on the interaction, but usually keeps this interaction framed within the existing service model. This lowers the chance of breakthrough innovation. Try using a job to be done to open the range of innovation.  [02]
• When inventing future-state journeys, many participants will be too optimistic. They will create journeys where everyone wants to sign up right away. Encourage them to remember that customers are often busy, distracted, skeptical, and tired – that will lead to much more interesting ideas.
• When you review the journeys, do you see the offering in every step? This might be a sign that the participants have mapped their process, not the experience. Is that what you want?

Variation: One-Step Journey storming

One high-energy variant of ideation around future-state journeys is called “One Step Journey.” This method, based on the old improvisation game “One Word Story,” is a fast way to generate lots of rough journeys: 

• ‍Arrange the team in a circle. Someone will kick off by briefly describing their idea for the first step of the journey. 
• The next person will fully accept that idea and describe what the second step would be. 
• The third person will build on that, and so on round and round the circle. If someone has no idea, they can just say “pass,” and the next person takes over. 
• To keep this moving fast, encourage participants to just describe the step, then draw or write it on a piece of paper after the next person has started. 
• When the journey is finished, the next person can start a new journey, or return to an interesting point in one of the completed journeys and explore alternative developments.
• With a group who have some experience in thinking of journeys, this method can create five or six rough journeys in a quarter of an hour. 

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How to Facilitate a Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

Posted in Blog , Facilitation , Innovation , Virtual Facilitation by Jo North

Facilitate a Customer Journey Mapping Workshop that Gets Great Results

The purpose of this article is to help you to:

• Discover great ways to facilitate a customer journey mapping workshop and create insightful, actionable before and after customer journey maps with my step-by-step guide.
• Learn the fundamentals of customer journey mapping and add it to your business tools to improve your organization’s understanding of the customers’ perspective.
• Find out why a customer journey mapping workshop is important for creating a better customer experience and meeting important business needs.
• Improve your knowledge of customer journey mapping and create a clearer understanding of your customers with this powerful tool.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

What is a customer journey mapping workshop, overview of the key steps to creating a customer journey map, why facilitate a customer journey mapping workshop.

• Transport for London
• Gather Data for Your Workshop

Types of Data

• Importance of Customer Emotions

Risks and Benefits of Co-creating with Real Customers

Introducing the workshop, activity 1: persona creation, different types and styles of customer journey maps, activity 3: pain point analysis, activity 4: creating a new customer journey, activity 5: action planning, post-workshop follow-up, how to create an engaging, productive and fun customer journey mapping workshop, validating your new customer journey.

• Examples of Customer Journey Mapping Software Tools
• Some Useful References and Resources

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool that businesses can use to understand and improve their customer experience. It involves creating a visual representation of every step that a customer takes when interacting with a brand, from initial awareness through to post-purchase activities.

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into customer behavior, pain points, and motivations.

By understanding these factors, businesses can identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance the customer experience.

Simply put, a customer journey mapping workshop is a collaborative process where team members work together to create a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a business.

By identifying the different touchpoints a customer has with your business, you can better understand their needs, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

The ultimate goal of the workshop is to create a better customer experience and meet important business needs.

The process of creating a customer journey map typically involves the following steps:

• Define the stages of the customer journey : The first step is to identify the key stages that a customer goes through when interacting with the brand. This might include awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase activities.
• Gather data : Next, businesses need to gather data about customer behavior at each stage of the journey. This might include surveys, interviews, customer feedback, and analytics data.
• Map the journey : Once the data has been gathered, it’s time to create a visual representation of the customer journey. This might be done using a flowchart or a series of diagrams that illustrate the key touchpoints and interactions that a customer has with the brand.
• Identify customers’ pain points and opportunities : The next step is to analyze the customer journey map and identify areas where the customer experience could be improved. This might include pain points where customers are experiencing frustration or dissatisfaction, as well as opportunities to enhance the customer experience.
• Create a new, target state journey map : Using insights from identification of pain points and opportunities, create a new plan that elevates the user experience and will help to achieve your business innovation and growth objectives.
• Develop a plan : Finally, develop a plan to move from the current customer journey map to the new, target one. This might involve making changes to the product or service, improving customer service, or developing new marketing strategies.

A customer journey mapping workshop is a powerful way to create a better customer experience and meet important business needs. By using different perspectives, identifying pain points, and creating a new customer journey, you can improve the entire map of the customer journey.

Whether you run an in-person or online workshop, a thorough and collaborative process can help you gain a clearer understanding of your customers and create a better customer experience.

Real Examples of Customer Journey Maps

To inspire you and your business, here are three examples of real customer journey mapping from a variety of industries and places around the world:

1. Transport for London

Transport for London (TfL) used customer journey mapping to identify pain points in the customer experience of using public transport in London. By mapping the journey from planning a journey to arriving at the destination, TfL was able to identify areas where customers were experiencing frustration and develop strategies to improve the customer experience.

IKEA used customer journey mapping to understand the customer experience of buying and assembling furniture. By mapping the journey from research and planning to assembly and post-purchase, IKEA was able to identify pain points and develop new products and services to address these issues, such as online planning tools and assembly services.

Ikea is also well-known for its meticulously planned approach to their internal store layouts, which funnel customers through a deliberate journey amongst room designs and products to inspire customers to buy.

Westpac, a bank in Australia, used customer journey mapping to identify opportunities for innovation in its mobile banking app . By mapping the customer journey from downloading the app to making a transaction, Westpac was able to identify pain points and develop new features to improve the customer experience, such as mobile check deposits and real-time spending notifications.

There’s also a great example here of how Westpac used customer journey mapping in ux design to explore a particular problem with business banking.

Preparation for your Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

Take these steps to prepare for your customer journey mapping workshop:

• Define the purpose and scope of the workshop: In particular, be specific about which customer segment(s) and which part(s) of the customer journey experience you want to focus on. Keep you scope well-defined – don’t try to cover too much. Your scoping might involve identifying the key touchpoints and interactions that customers have with the business, as well as the goals and outcomes that you want to achieve through the mapping process.
• Gather data: Gather data about customer behavior at each stage of the journey. This might include surveys, interviews, customer feedback, and analytics data.
• Identify the stages of the journey: Based on the data gathered, identify the key stages of the customer journey that customers go through when interacting with your business.

Gather Data for Your Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

To help your workshop participants to develop a comprehensive customer journey map, you’ll need to gather data about customer behavior at each stage of the journey.

Here are some of the key types of data that you need to gather:

Demographic Data

Demographic data includes information such as age, gender, income, education, and location. It helps businesses to understand the characteristics of their target customers and how these characteristics may impact their behavior.

Behavioral Data

Behavioral data includes information about how customers interact with your business at each stage of the journey. This might include website traffic, engagement with marketing materials, and customer service interactions.

Behavioral data helps businesses to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement in the customer journey.

Attitudinal Data

Attitudinal data includes information about customer attitudes, opinions, and beliefs. It helps businesses to understand the motivations and emotions that drive customer behavior.

Competitor Data

Competitor data includes information about your competitors’ products, services, and marketing strategies. It helps businesses to identify areas where they can differentiate themselves and improve the customer experience.

Industry Data

Industry data includes information about industry trends, consumer preferences, and regulatory changes. It helps businesses to stay informed about external factors that may impact the customer experience.

Analytics Data

Analytics data includes data from web analytics tools, social media analytics, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. It helps businesses to understand customer behavior on a granular level and identify opportunities for improvement.

Customer Feedback

Customer feedback includes information from customer surveys, online reviews, and customer service interactions.

It helps businesses to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement in the customer journey, as well as to understand customer sentiment towards the brand.

Remember the Importance of Customer Emotions

Emotions play a critical role in the customer journey mapping process as they have a significant impact on customer behavior and decision-making. Understanding customer emotions is essential for creating a customer journey map that accurately reflects the customer experience and identifies areas for improvement.

Emotions can be positive or negative and can arise at any stage of the customer journey. For example, a customer may feel excited and hopeful when they first discover a product, frustrated and confused during the purchase process, and satisfied or disappointed after the product arrives.

When creating a customer journey map, it’s essential to consider the emotional experiences that customers have at each touchpoint. This might include identifying moments where customers experience positive emotions, such as delight or joy, as well as moments where they experience negative emotions, such as frustration or anger.

By understanding the emotional experiences of customers, businesses can identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance the customer experience. For example, if customers are experiencing frustration during the purchase process, businesses might simplify the process or provide more guidance and support.

Furthermore, emotions are closely tied to customer loyalty and advocacy. Customers who have positive emotional experiences are more likely to become loyal customers and advocates for the brand, while customers who have negative emotional experiences are more likely to switch to a competitor or leave negative feedback.

What to do if you lack data for your customer journey mapping workshop?

If your business does not have access to sufficient data, you may struggle to create an accurate and comprehensive journey map. To overcome this challenge, collect more data through customer feedback surveys, user research, and other data gathering methods. Or invite some trusted, representative and key customers to all or parts of your session.

Co-creating a Customer Journey Map with Real Customers

Co-creating a customer journey map with customers can be an effective way to gain insights into the customer experience and identify areas for improvement.

Here are some ways to co-create a customer journey map with customers:

• Conduct customer workshops: Conducting customer workshops is an effective way to involve customers in the customer journey mapping process. Workshops can include interactive exercises, such as customer journey mapping activities, where customers provide feedback and insights on their experience.
• Conduct customer interviews: Conducting customer interviews can provide valuable insights into customer experiences and emotions throughout the customer journey. This can help to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement in the customer journey.
• Engage customers through social media: Social media can be a powerful tool for engaging customers and involving them in the customer journey mapping process. Businesses can create polls, surveys, and other interactive content to gather feedback and insights from customers.
• Create customer feedback channels: Creating feedback channels, such as online forums or customer feedback forms, can provide customers with an opportunity to share their experiences and provide feedback on the customer journey.
• Use customer journey mapping software: There are several customer journey mapping software available that allow customers to collaborate in real-time with businesses. These tools can facilitate co-creation of the customer journey map by allowing customers to provide feedback and suggestions on the map.

There are some more ideas on how to create a great event for your customers here .

Involving customers in the customer journey mapping process can have both risks and benefits. Here are some of the potential risks and benefits of involving customers in the process, along with strategies for dealing with them:

• Greater customer satisfaction : By involving customers in the process, businesses can gain a better understanding of their needs and preferences, leading to a more satisfying customer experience.
• More accurate insights : Customers can provide valuable insights into their experiences that businesses may not be aware of, leading to more accurate and comprehensive journey maps.
• Enhanced customer engagement : Involving customers in the process can create a sense of ownership and investment in the customer journey, leading to greater engagement and loyalty.
• Greater innovation : By involving customers in the process, businesses can identify new ideas and opportunities for innovation that they may not have considered otherwise.
• Complexity : Involving customers in the process can make it more complex and time-consuming, potentially slowing down the journey mapping process.
• Biased feedback : Customers may provide biased or incomplete feedback, leading to inaccurate or incomplete journey maps.
• Confidentiality concerns : Customers may be hesitant to provide feedback if they are concerned about the confidentiality of their information.
• Cost : Involving customers in the process can be costly, particularly if businesses need to offer incentives or compensation for their time and participation.

Strategies for dealing with risks:

• Manage complexity : To manage the complexity of involving customers in the process, businesses can break the process down into smaller, more manageable steps and use technology to streamline communication and collaboration.
• Address bias : To address bias in customer feedback, businesses can use a variety of feedback methods and gather feedback from a diverse group of customers to ensure that multiple perspectives are represented.
• Ensure confidentiality : To address confidentiality concerns, businesses can communicate clearly with customers about how their feedback will be used and stored, and ensure that all customer data is stored securely.
• Control costs : To manage costs, businesses can consider offering non-monetary incentives, such as recognition or exclusive access to new products or services.

Customer Journey Mapping Workshop Agenda

Introduction:.

• Welcome and introductions
• Overview of the purpose and scope of the workshop
• Define customer personas based on demographic and behavioral data
• Get clear on the personas’ “jobs to be done”. These are what the customer really aims to accomplish when interacting with your business.
• Identify the characteristics, goals, and pain points of each persona

Activity 2: Creating a Customer Journey Map

• Identify the stages of the customer journey based on the data gathered
• Map out the touchpoints and interactions that customers have with the business at each stage of the journey
• Add emotional and behavioral insights to each touchpoint based on the customer feedback and data gathered
• Analyze the customer journey map to identify areas where the customer experience could be improved
• Identify pain points where customers are experiencing frustration or dissatisfaction, as well as opportunities to enhance the customer experience
• Prioritize actions that need to be taken to improve the customer experience based on the pain points identified
• Develop a plan to address the pain points and opportunities identified in the customer journey map
• Recap of the workshop and key insights gained
• Review of action plan and next steps
• Share the customer journey map and action plan with the team and stakeholders
• Validate the new customer journey map with real customers
• Implement the action plan and monitor the impact on the customer experience
• Review and update the customer journey map regularly to ensure that it remains relevant and up-to-date

Here are some creative elements that you can incorporate into your customer journey mapping workshop to make it even more engaging, productive and fun:

• Role-playing: In this activity, team members take on the role of customers and act out different scenarios to explore the customer journey. This can help to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement in the customer experience. Even better, bring in some real customers for parts of your workshop!
• Visual storytelling: Use visual aids, such as images, videos, or infographics, to tell the story of the customer journey throughout your workshop. This can help to engage team members and provide a deeper understanding of the customer experience.
• Gamification: All the way through your workshop you can use game mechanics, such as points, rewards, and challenges, to make the customer journey mapping process more engaging and fun. This can help to increase team participation and creativity.
• Work in manageable chunks: Customer journeys can be complex and involve multiple touchpoints across different channels. This can make it difficult to create a comprehensive and accurate journey map. To overcome this challenge, make sure that your workshop participants break down the customer journey into smaller, more manageable parts and use multiple maps to cover the entire journey.

There are lots of other useful tips on how to be a great facilitator in my article here .

At the start of your workshop, set clear ground rules. This means establishing common goals, providing a basic understanding of customer journey mapping, and setting time management guidelines. It’s also important to ensure that all workshop participants, from senior managers to the marketing team, understand the importance of customer satisfaction, customer experience and empathy in the workshop.

To begin the workshop, divide workshop attendees into smaller groups and assign each group a different team to work on. Each team should represent a different target persona, or ideal customer, to ensure that the workshop covers a variety of perspectives. It’s also important to use research data, such as market research or customer interviews, to guide the workshop process.

Persona creation is a process of creating fictional characters that represent the different types of customers who interact with your business. Personas help businesses to understand the characteristics, goals or “ jobs to be done “, and pain points of their target customers, and use this understanding to create products and services that meet their needs.

You could use a template like the one shown in the visual below.

Step-by-step Guide on How to Do Persona Creation

• Gather data: The first step in persona creation is to gather data about your customers. This might include demographic data such as age, gender, income, and education, as well as behavioral data such as purchasing habits, interests, and motivations.
• Identify commonalities: Once you have gathered data, identify the common characteristics that customers share. This might include shared goals, pain points, or behaviors.
• Define your personas: Based on the commonalities identified, define your personas. A persona is a fictional character that represents a specific customer type. Give each persona a name, demographic information, and behavioral information that reflects their characteristics.
• Prioritize personas: Prioritize the personas based on their importance to your business. You may want to focus on personas that represent your primary target audience or personas that represent a segment of your customer base that you want to grow.
• Validate your personas: Validate your personas by testing them against the data that you have gathered. Ensure that each persona accurately reflects the characteristics, goals, and pain points of your target customers.
• Use your personas: Use your personas to guide decision-making across your business. Use them to inform product development, marketing, and customer service strategies that meet the needs of your target customers.

Bonus tip: I encourage people to think about a number of real customers within the same segment that they know well . A lso to use key insights about these real people to develop their customer personas for the workshop.

Alternative Persona Creation Activities

Gamification option.

• Divide the team into smaller groups and assign each group a persona and a specific customer journey stage to focus on.
• Give each group a set of cards or tokens, each representing a different touchpoint or interaction that customers have with the business at their assigned stage.
• Explain the rules of the game: Teams must use the cards or tokens to create a customer journey map for their assigned stage, placing the cards or tokens in the order that customers would typically encounter them.
• Each card or token has a point value assigned to it, based on its importance to the customer journey. Teams must strategize and allocate their cards or tokens in a way that maximizes their point value.
• After a set amount of time, have the teams present their customer journey maps and explain their strategy for maximizing point value.
• Award prizes or recognition to the team that earns the most points or develops the most innovative strategy.

Customer Empathy Interviews

Customer empathy interviews are a good option to support this activity. In the session, or as pre-work, teams conduct interviews with customers to gain insights into their experiences and emotions throughout the customer journey. This can help to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement in the customer experience.

It’s a great idea to video record these interviews. They can be shared with colleagues internally.

The first step is to create a user journey map.

Sometimes this is called a “current-state hypothesis map”. This map is a visual representation of the customer journey based on assumptions and hypotheses about the customer experience. It should include all the touchpoints and interactions that customers have with the business using the available data.

It involves creating a visual representation of the customer’s journey, including the key moments, touchpoints, and pain points. You can do this by using sticky notes or an empathy map, a powerful tool for understanding the customer’s perspective.

To create the user journey map, plot the different touchpoints and experiences along a horizontal line that represents the chronological order of the customer journey. Then, use a vertical axis to represent the customer’s emotions and experiences at each touchpoint. This will give your participants a clearer understanding of the customer’s experience and help them to identify areas of opportunity.

Bonus tip: You could ask delegates to create their versions of the current state customer journey map in advance of the workshop, to bring with them and combine with their colleagues’ versions.

There are several types and styles of customer journey maps, each with their own unique features and benefits. Here’s a detailed list of some of the most common types and styles:

Linear Journey Map

A linear journey map shows the customer journey as a linear progression, with each stage of the journey represented by a sequential step. This is the most common and traditional style of customer journey map.

Non-linear Journey Map

A non-linear journey map represents the customer journey in a non-linear format, such as a diagram or flowchart, that allows the customer to move back and forth between stages as needed. This style is useful for complex customer journeys with multiple touchpoints.

Emotional Journey Map

An emotional journey map focuses on the emotional experiences of customers at each stage of the journey. This style can be used to identify emotional pain points and opportunities for emotional connection with customers.

Service Blueprint

A service blueprint is a detailed map that shows the interactions between customers, employees, and processes across the entire service experience. This style is useful for identifying pain points and opportunities for process improvement.

Usually, first-hand interactions with employees in your business are captured as “front of house” or “on stage” experiences. People working “behind the scenes” – such as finance, despatch, marketing (depending on the nature of your business) are also included in the journey experience map to indicate how well the organization is set up to serve the customer.

In addition to employees, physical and virtual touchpoints on the journey are tracked and analyzed.

Moments of Truth

Examining the customer’s interaction with these elements can shed light on the “moments of truth” for your business.

Moments of truth (MoT) are moments when the customer interacts with your brand, product or service, and their experience leads them to create or change their opinion (positively or negatively) about your proposition and business.

Persona-based Journey Map

A persona-based journey map shows the customer journey from the perspective of a specific customer persona. This style is useful for identifying pain points and opportunities to enhance the customer experience for a particular group of customers.

Channel-based Journey Map

A channel-based journey map shows the customer journey for a specific channel or touchpoint, such as a website or mobile app. This style is useful for identifying pain points and opportunities to improve the customer experience for a particular channel.

Hybrid Journey Map

A hybrid journey map combines elements of multiple journey map styles to provide a comprehensive and detailed view of the customer journey. This style is useful for complex customer journeys that involve multiple touch points and interactions.

Bear in mind that some of these are overlapping and their features can be combined – e.g. you can create a non-linear, persona-based emotional journey map.

Decide what sort of map you’d like your workshop participants to create in advance of the session.

As long as they stay on track, participants can enhance and shape the format of their map as they work, so allow for some creative freedom within the scope that you set them.

Advanced Tips

A question that facilitators and delegates often ask me is: “how do you do customer journey mapping when your customer swaps between numerous channels in the same journey?”

I wholeheartedly agree that when customers swap between numerous channels in the same journey, it can be challenging to create a traditional linear journey map.

However, there are several approaches you can take to create an effective customer journey map in this scenario.

Multi-channel journey map

A multi-channel journey map shows the customer journey across multiple channels, highlighting the touchpoints and interactions that occur on each channel. This approach can help businesses to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement at each touchpoint.

Channel-specific journey maps

Creating channel-specific journey maps for each channel the customer uses can provide a more detailed and targeted view of the customer journey. This approach allows businesses to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement on each channel. They can then develop strategies to improve the overall customer experience.

Journey mapping with customer feedback

Gathering feedback from customers about their journey across multiple channels can provide valuable insights into pain points and areas for improvement. This approach allows businesses to identify customer needs and preferences across different channels and develop strategies to meet these needs.

A customer pain point refers to a specific problem or challenge that a customer is facing in relation to a product or service. It is a term often used in business and marketing to describe areas where customers are dissatisfied and may be considering a switch to a competitor’s offering. Identifying and addressing customer pain points is a critical aspect of customer experience management and can help businesses improve their products or services to better meet customer needs.

A customer pain point can take many forms. Examples are a difficult user interface, poor customer service, high costs, or low product quality. Identifying these pain points requires careful observation of customer behavior, feedback, and market research. Addressing pain points may involve product redesign, process improvement, or a shift in marketing strategy.

By addressing your customers’ most important pain points better than your competition, you’ll create a distinctive, compelling value proposition .

Make sure participants identify the real customer pain points, not superficial ones.

Identifying Challenges and Opportunities

As you work through the journey mapping process, it’s important to keep the scope of the journey in mind. This means focusing on the entire journey, from the first point of contact to the end point, rather than isolated touchpoints. By taking a comprehensive approach, you can create a better customer experience.

Once you’ve created the user journey map, next identify the biggest challenges and opportunities for improvement. Use the entire team’s expertise and knowledge to identify the biggest pain points and negative experiences. This will help you prioritize which areas need the most attention.

Prioritizing Pain Points

After gathering feedback and refining the map, the next step is to prioritize pain points within the journey. This involves identifying the most critical pain points that have the greatest impact on the customer experience. Prioritizing pain points helps to ensure that resources are focused on the most important issues and that the customer experience is improved in the most impactful way.

The next step is to create a new customer journey, one that takes into account the areas of opportunity you identified earlier. This can be done by brainstorming different ways to improve the customer experience and testing them out to see which works best.

The final step in facilitating a customer journey mapping workshop is to create a future-state vision through sketching activities.

This involves creating a visual representation of the ideal customer experience, based on the feedback and ideas generated during the workshop.

Participants can be asked to sketch their vision of the future-state journey map and share their ideas with the group. This can help to create a shared vision of the ideal customer experience and provide a roadmap for future improvements.

Storytelling Activities for Your Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

I strongly recommend that you consider asking your workshop participants to use storytelling activities to bring their customer journey mapping to life. There are lots of ideas for facilitators in my article here and video below.

Competitive Differentiation

Creating a customer experience that differentiates a business positively from the competition is crucial to attracting and retaining customers. Here are some ways you can prompt and encourage your workshop participants can achieve this:

• Provide personalized experiences : Use customer data to provide personalized experiences that meet the unique needs and preferences of each customer. This can include personalized recommendations, customized products, and personalized communication.
• Create a seamless experience : Ensure that the customer experience is seamless and effortless, with easy navigation and clear communication at every touchpoint. This can include clear product descriptions, simple checkout processes, and responsive customer service.
• Focus on emotion : Focus on creating emotional connections with customers, such as by providing exceptional customer service or by tapping into customer values and beliefs. This can help to build loyalty and differentiate the business from competitors.
• Innovate : Continuously innovate and improve the customer experience, whether through new products or services, new technologies, or new processes. This can help to set the business apart from competitors and provide a unique value proposition.
• Cultivate a strong brand : Develop a strong brand identity and voice that resonates with customers and reflects the values and personality of the business. A strong brand can help to differentiate the business from competitors and create a positive emotional connection with customers.

At the end of this activity, your delegates should have finalized maps of the customer journey that reflect customers’ most important needs.

Activity 5: Action Planning – Next Steps for Your Customer Journey Planning Workshop

Once the team has generated a list of ideas, prioritize and select the most feasible and impactful actions. Use a tool such as a decision matrix. This can help the team evaluate and rank the ideas based on their potential impact and feasibility.

Ask your participants to agree roles and responsibilities. Set realistic timelines and deadlines for each action item. Agree to track progress regularly to ensure that the team is making progress towards their goals and objectives.

Post Customer Journey Mapping Workshop Follow-Up

Share the customer journey map and action plan with the team and stakeholders.

Make sure that the team validates the maps with real customers.

Once the action plan is being implemented, monitor the impact on the customer experience using data.

Don’t stop there. Drive for continuous improvement. Review and update the customer journey map regularly to ensure that it remains relevant and up-to-date

Validating a customer journey map is an essential step in ensuring that the map accurately reflects the customer experience and identifies areas for improvement.

Here are some ways to validate a customer journey map:

• Review and analyze customer feedback : Reviewing customer feedback, such as surveys, online reviews, and customer service interactions, can help to identify pain points and areas for improvement in the customer journey. Comparing the feedback with the customer journey map can validate or highlight any discrepancies in the map.
• Conduct user testing : User testing involves having customers interact with the business or product and providing feedback on their experience. This can help to validate the customer journey map and identify any issues or opportunities that were not previously identified.
• Analyze web dat a: Web analytics, such as website traffic and engagement metrics, can help to validate the customer journey map and identify any areas where customers are experiencing issues or dropping off.
• Conduct interviews with customers : Conducting interviews with customers can provide valuable insights into their experiences and emotions throughout the customer journey. This can help to validate the customer journey map and identify any areas for improvement.
• Collaborate with stakeholders : Collaborating with stakeholders, such as marketing, sales, and customer service teams, can help to validate the customer journey map and ensure that it accurately reflects the customer experience. Stakeholders can provide insights and feedback on the map based on their experiences and interactions with customers.

There are lots more creative techniques for validating business ideas in this article here .

Examples of Software Tools for Your Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

There are several software options available that you could use to create, analyze, and improve your customer journey maps.

Here are some examples of customer journey mapping software:

Smaply is a customer journey mapping software that allows businesses to create and share customer journey maps. The software includes features such as persona creation, touchpoint mapping, and data visualization.

Touchpoint Dashboard

Touchpoint Dashboard is a customer journey mapping suite of tools that allows businesses to create customer journeys across multiple channels. The tool includes features such as touchpoint analysis, customer persona creation, and data visualization.

UXPressia is a customer journey mapping software that allows businesses to create and share customer journey maps. The tool includes features such as persona creation, touchpoint mapping, and customer feedback analysis.

Canvanizer is a cloud-based customer journey mapping software that allows businesses to create, collaborate and share customer journey maps. The tool includes features such as persona creation, touchpoint mapping, and data visualization.

Customer Journey Mapping by Creately

Customer Journey Mapping by Creately is a customer journey mapping software that allows businesses to create and share customer journey maps. The software includes features such as touchpoint mapping, customer persona creation, and data visualization.

Miro Customer Journey Map Template

Miro Customer Journey Map Template. Your participants can plot customers’ paths and collaborate on solving their wants and needs with Miro’s online workshop template.

These customer journey mapping tools can help you and your business to collaborate and gain insights into customer behavior, pain points, and motivation .

Some Useful References and Resources for Your Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

Harvard Business Review. (2015). The new science of customer emotions. https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-new-science-of-customer-emotions

The Journey Mapping Playbook: A Practical Guide to Preparing, Facilitating and Unlocking the Value of Customer Journey Mapping , by Jerry Angrave

How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Mapping to Drive Customer Focused Change , by Jim Tincher and Nicole Newton

Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams: A Complete Guide to Customer Alignment Through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams , by James Kalbach

User Journey Mapping , by Stephanie Walter

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How to Create Effective Journey Maps: Learnings from the IxDF Course

A low conversion rate (below 2%) usually means a website struggles to keep visitors interested. Journey mapping helps identify why visitors leave quickly and tracks every step of a user's interaction with a website. The goal is simple: to create a smooth, enjoyable journey to make users return. Learn the secrets of journey maps with the IxDF course, Journey mapping . This course shows you how to pinpoint improvement areas effectively and how to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

Have you ever found yourself lost on a website, unsure where to click next? Frustrating digital experiences make us want to give up and leave. This is why journey mapping is so important. It's a strategic approach in UX design that lays out a user's path through a product or service. When you understand each step a user takes, you can create more intuitive and enjoyable experiences. 

In journey mapping, you plot a course to guide users from one point to another. This method reveals the pain points and moments of delight in a user's product interaction. When you smooth out these critical junctures, you can craft solutions that meet and exceed user expectations. 

“ Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.”    - Joe Sparano 

Journey mapping equips us with the insights needed to refine the user experience and create first encounters with your product, both positive and memorable. Since 94% of first impressions relate to a website's design, it’s critical to make an excellent first impression through a well-mapped user journey. A solid understanding of journey mapping principles can transform a confusing or mediocre user experience into one that’s engaging and seamless.  

To create seamless user journeys, you must understand the journey mapping process in detail. Look at the fundamental aspects you should explore to craft better digital experiences. 

Journey Mapping: The Essentials

Journey mapping enables teams to visualize the user's experience from initial contact through various interactions to the final goal. Let’s run through the basics.  

What is Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping creates a detailed visualization of a user's experience with a product or service. It maps out each step a user takes. It highlights their feelings, motivations and challenges. This process helps you identify pain points and opportunities to enhance the user experience. 

Watch Matt Snyder, Head of Product & Design at Hivewire, discuss journey mapping in UX. 

• Transcript loading…

Why Journey Mapping Matters

Journey mapping matters because it shows where users face struggles and frustrations. If you understand these issues, you can make your websites or services better. This means happier customers who are more likely to return and recommend the product/service to others. 

Consider the process users follow to book a flight online. The user's journey begins with the search for flights. Here, they might encounter their first obstacle: a confusing interface. This moment could lead to frustration. It may push them towards a competitor's website. Journey mapping would reveal this pain point and allow you to simplify the search process. 

Next, the user selects a flight. If the site bombards them with too many upsell options, like seat upgrades or extra baggage, it might overwhelm them. A well-designed journey map would highlight this issue. It may suggest a more streamlined and helpful upsell process, not pushy. 

Finally, the user reaches the payment section. A complex checkout process with unclear pricing and surprise charges can deter them from completing the purchase. Journey mapping pinpoints this critical moment. You may have to recommend a clearer, more concise checkout flow. 

If you map out this journey, your design team can: 

Simplify the flight search interface to reduce initial frustration. 

Streamline the upsell process to enhance the user experience without overwhelming them. 

Revise the checkout process for clarity and ease. You must encourage the completion of the purchase. 

Watch this quick video that explains the power of mapping. 

How Journey Mapping Improves UX

Journey mapping provides a clear framework to analyze and optimize each touchpoint in the user's journey. It allows you to: 

Identify and eliminate barriers that cause frustration or abandonment. 

Enhance features that users find valuable. 

Design with a holistic understanding of the user's experience. 

Journey Mapping Variations

Journey mapping comes in different forms. Each one offers unique insights into the user experience. These variations can help you apply the right approach to your UX challenges. You’ll learn about these variations in detail in our journey mapping course.  

Experience Maps

Experience maps are the broadest form of journey maps. They map out the overall human experience in different situations. You can use these maps for more than product or service interactions. Their goal is to get a broad understanding of human behaviors and feelings.  

For example, consider mapping the common experience of commuting. This could include various methods like walking or biking to public transport. Experience maps can help you spot common issues and chances for improvement. They prepare you for more detailed studies. 

Example of an Experience map for ordering a car through an app. It shows the actions, problems, emotions, quotes and opportunities that relate to the user.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps narrow the focus. They focus on how a person interacts with a specific product or service. These maps help us understand a customer's experience with a business. 

A customer journey map includes the following elements.  

Customer persona : This defines a typical customer. You create a character that represents a part of your customer base. 

Phases : Stages of the customer journey. It typically includes Awareness, Research, Consideration, Purchase and Support. 

Touchpoints : These are all interaction points between the customer and your brand across different phases. This interaction may happen through marketing materials, digital presence, staff interactions, purchase process and post-purchase follow-up. 

Customer thoughts, actions and emotions : Detail what customers think, do and feel at each touchpoint. Use surveys and direct feedback for accuracy. 

Opportunities : You list the chances to improve the customer's experience, solve any issues they face and make their journey smoother. 

For instance, with a music streaming app like Spotify, a customer journey map would show how a user finds, chooses and uses the app. It would point out their main steps and where they might have problems. 

An example of a customer journey map for a music streaming app. It tracks interactions from the initial visit to the response. It also highlights emotions and thoughts at each stage.

© Draft.io, Fair Use

Service Blueprints

Service blueprints build on what we learn from customer journey maps . Unlike journey maps, which focus on the customer's experience, service blueprints give us a peek into how the service works behind the scenes. They show how different parts of the service work together to support the customer's journey. 

The anatomy of a service blueprint showing all the key processes in different phases. (described below)

A service blueprint maps out five key areas: 

Physical evidence: This is anything the customer can see, touch or interact with, like a website or a product. It includes all the physical parts of the service. 

Customer's actions: These are the steps customers take when they use the service. The service needs these actions to meet the customer's needs. 

Frontstage: This area is all about what the customer interacts with directly. It's the part of the service the customer sees and uses. 

Backstage: These are the parts of the service that happen out of the customer's view. They support the frontstage but remain hidden to the customer. 

Supporting actions: These are the behind-the-scenes processes that make sure the service operates smoothly.    

The Role of Research in Effective Journey Mapping

You need comprehensive data—both qualitative and quantitative—to create an accurate and useful journey map. This process involves understanding the problems your users face and the potential solutions. Here’s an overview of key steps to collect the necessary information. 

Research Problems and Solutions

Identify the problems and opportunities within the user experience. You must look at the issue from two angles: the problem space and the solution space.  

In the problem space, you aim to understand the user's challenges, needs and pain points. You typically do this through qualitative user research , such as user observation and interviews. Quantitative methods like surveys can also contribute. You don’t need to consider the existing solutions.  

A straightforward perspective grid for a person aiming to become an expert drummer. This individual needs a clear path, access to drums and some instruction. 

In the solution space, you ideate potential solutions to problems you identified. This shift requires a creative approach. You aim to explore various ideas that effectively address users’ needs and evaluate those in usability sessions or A/B testing. 

A simple perspective grid for a Rhythm Road customer. This customer is between coaching sessions. They need help from Rhythm Road to remember to practice. 

Organize Your Research

A perspective grid helps you organize and synthesize the data collected from your research. You can use it to ensure the remainder of the journey mapping process proceeds smoothly. It allows you to categorize insights based on different user perspectives or personas . This step helps you understand the experiences and expectations of your user base. 

To create a perspective grid, list your user personas along one axis and the stages of their journey along the other. Fill in each cell with the Gaps/Barriers/Pain/Risks relevant to that persona at each stage. This visualization helps you identify commonalities and differences across the journey.  

How to Create Journey Map Variations

Each journey map variation helps you achieve specific goals. Let's explore how to create experience maps, customer journey maps and service design blueprints. 

How to Create an Experience Map

An Experience Map involves a five-step approach.  

Plan your experience map : Determine the scope. Decide who needs to participate in the workshop. Consider a cross-disciplinary team for better insights. 

Customer research : Gather factual data along with user stories and analytics. This step helps you fill knowledge gaps. 

Run the workshop : An all-day event where diverse voices collaborate. You must plan the event for productive outcomes. 

Create your experience map : Turn the workshop findings into a visual map. This map should outline general common experiences related to your field. 

Use your experience map : Apply what you learned to make decisions and improvements in your organization. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Follow these seven steps to map out the detailed interactions users have with your organization: 

Define your objectives : Determine what you aim to achieve with the map. 

Gather Information : Understand your customers’ behaviors, needs and how they interact with your product. 

Identify customer touchpoints : Note how customers interact with your product. Then, understand how these touchpoints affect their experience. 

Outline key stages of customer experience : From the customer's perspective, map the sequence of events. Document all events from initial contact to post-purchase support. 

Start mapping : Use diagrams or digital tools to visualize the journey. Include touchpoints, emotional responses and any other relevant factors. 

Validate your results : Get feedback from customers and internal teams to ensure accuracy. 

Analyze your map : Compare it against your goals to see if it meets customer expectations. 

How to Create a Service Design Blueprint

Service design focuses on the internal workings of a service. It outlines frontstage and backstage actions. Here’s how to develop a Service Design Blueprint:

Find support : Assemble a cross-disciplinary team and secure stakeholder buy-in. 

Define the goal : Set a clear scope and business objective for the blueprint. 

Gather research : Unlike customer journey mapping, a blueprint requires more internal research. It includes direct observations and employee interviews. 

Map the blueprint : Organize a workshop to determine the five elements encountered throughout the service delivery. 

Refine and distribute : Enhance the blueprint with contextual details. Then, distribute it to stakeholders to communicate the internal processes.  

The Role of a Journey Mapping Workshop (and How to Do It Right)

The effectiveness of journey mapping hinges on a detailed and well-organized journey mapping workshop. This is when teams work together to understand and improve customer experiences.

Here’s how to navigate the pre-workshop preparation and conduct the workshop. 

Before the Journey -Mapping Workshop

Preparation is key. Assemble a diverse team to bring a wide range of views. Prioritize the customer personas and scenarios you'll focus on to maintain a clear focus. Share existing research with all participants to get everyone on the same page. They should understand the journey's context. 

Build a Collaborative Team

Journey mapping thrives on collaboration. Include people from various departments to ensure a holistic view of the customer journey. Don’t forget to invite stakeholders who will decide on the final approach. This team will help you create the map and implement its findings. 

Prioritize Actors and Scenarios

Focus on specific customer personas and how they interact with your service. It helps you create a more targeted and actionable journey map. If you cover multiple personas or scenarios, plan how to manage this complexity. 

Share and Analyze Existing Research

Compile and review all data related to the journey. This may include user experience studies, marketing analysis and customer feedback. Share information before the workshop to help everyone understand the starting point. 

Assign Pre-Workshop Tasks

Assign homework to make the participants well-prepared. It includes background reading and key questions related to the journey. This pre-engagement makes the workshop more effective.  

During the Journey-Mapping Workshop

The workshop should be an active and engaging process. It starts with building a basic understanding. Then, you map the customer's experience and brainstorm ways to improve it. 

Establish the Foundation

You bring everyone on the same page to begin. Everyone should understand journey mapping principles, existing research and input methods. Use engaging activities like trivia to refresh key concepts and energize the group. 

Map the Current State

The team would create an assumption-based map of the current journey. This should reflect the team’s collective understanding. Offer attendees a template to identify pain points with ease: 

"   requires ______ to achieve ______." 

"   requires ______, allowing them to ______." 

For instance: "Bob requires an easier method to compare choices, allowing him to avoid feeling swamped."  

Note : It’s important to avoid using the first person , like "As a I want...". This format can be repetitive and time-consuming in documents full of user stories. It also shifts important information into sentences that make them harder to scan and understand. More importantly, you must not assume the user's perspective as that can lead developers to project their own experiences and biases onto users. 

Make the map open to revisions. Use customer interviews for this phase to validate assumptions and gain fresh insights. 

Vision the Future State

Use the identified pain points to brainstorm ideas to improve the customer journey. Encourage teams to think big and use metaphors in their ideas. This prevents them from focusing too early on specific solutions, like features. Sketch and critique potential future interactions to translate these ideas into tangible designs. 

You need the positive aspects on green sticky notes. You can mark areas for improvement on yellow ones. The critiques help refine the ideas.  

Now, merge the best elements from these individual sketches into a unified future-state flow. You can then share this consolidated journey with the whole workshop team. It will help you paint a picture of what the improved customer experience could look like. 

After the Journey -Mapping Workshop

The work doesn’t end when the workshop does. Quickly share the outcomes and next steps to maintain momentum. Further test and refine the ideas generated during the workshop. It’ll bring meaningful changes to the customer journey. 

Share Workshop Insights

Document and distribute the workshop's findings to all participants and stakeholders. This includes:  

The journey maps created 

Identified pain points 

Future state designs 

Keep everyone informed for continued engagement and support in implementing changes. 

Bring Ideas to Life

Translate the workshop's conceptual ideas into prototypes for user testing . This iterative design and feedback process helps refine the solutions into actionable improvements to the customer journey. 

Continuously Refine the Process

With each workshop, gather feedback on what worked and what didn’t to improve future sessions. This continuous improvement ensures that journey mapping remains a productive and insightful tool for your organization. 

This might seem like a lot, but if you want to learn about how to set up workshops, the journey mapping course can help you. You’ll learn how to:  

Increase understanding 

Create visions 

Guide evaluations 

Plan experiments 

Build a workshop plan 

About the Journey Mapping Course

Journey mapping is a 7-week course that will help you solve complex design problems with simple, user-friendly solutions. You’ll learn the right journey-mapping process for your goals and master data collection and analysis with a perspective grid. Create key journey maps: experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints. Gain skills to run a journey mapping workshop and turn insights into real solutions. 

This course will help you if you want to design smooth shopping experiences, easy signup flows or engaging apps. Start with journey mapping basics. Understand its power and role in UX design. Learn to identify, read and use various journey maps. Gain data gathering and analysis skills. Then, finish with the ability to create journey maps and lead workshops. 

Make sure to benefit from practical techniques and downloadable templates. Participate in three hands-on exercises in the " Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project. " These activities solidify your learning. They also offer an option to create a case study for your portfolio. 

Learn from four industry experts: 

Indi Young , founder of Adaptive Path, brings her deep understanding of data gathering in journey mapping. She wrote two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models . 

Kai Wang shares insights from his experiences at CarMax and CapitalOne. She emphasizes journey mapping's organizational impact. 

Head of Product & Design at Hivewire , Matt Snyder, presents journey mapping as an effective product development tool. He teaches the application of a perspective grid for smoother data-rich processes. 

Christian Briggs , Senior Product Designer and Design Educator, guides you through this course with his extensive experience in digital product design and journey mapping.  

This course caters to budding and intermediate designers eager to refine complex user experiences. It's ideal for:  

Aspiring UX/ UI designers seeking foundational design skills. 

Junior to mid-level designers aiming for advanced challenges and strategic team roles. 

Product managers focused on crafting intricate experiences. 

Join a global design community that shares knowledge. Collaborate, learn and grow with peers to enhance your design skills and career prospects. 

Course Overview 

Weekly lessons : We release each week with no deadlines. 

Learning time : Approximately 9 hours and 54 minutes over the span of 7 weeks. 

Where to Learn More

Enrollment for the Journey Mapping course is now open. It’s included in an  IxDF membership. 

To become a member, sign up here . 

Read our article Customer Journey Maps — Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes . 

Learn more about website conversion rates .  

Read web design statistics from WebFX . 

Journey Mapping

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How to Run a Journey-Mapping Workshop: A Step-by-Step Guide

Design a journey-mapping workshop that leads participants through current-state assumption mapping, pain-point identification, and future-state visioning..

Facilitating a journey map collaborative meeting can be a powerful way to gather information about a product or service and give your team a high-level overview. 

Think of taking a treasure hunt journey where you and your team search for opportunities that will delight and enrich your customer’s life and experience. 

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What is a Journey Map?

A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s a valuable exercise that provides a high-level process overview.

We do things automatically, like driving a car once you feel comfortable taking her anywhere. You stop to think about the steps you take. (Ah! muscle memory, don’t you love it?) 

But, sometimes, there is friction on these steps that, for the most part, we tend to ignore. And guess what? The people you serve do, too. 

And there lies the opportunity treasure.  Opportunities to solve problems and innovate solutions that matter.

Ready for an opportunity treasure hunt journey? 

Here is how to do it:  

Prep Step : Collect Information to Create the Customer Journey Map

Ask participants to gather the necessary information about their product or service. Propose to consider conducting or looking at past research and sketching out a rough map. This preparation will streamline the process and save time during the workshop.

Step 1: Draw the Journey Map

Start by choosing a large wall space or using a big whiteboard. If those are unavailable, use magic or Flipchart paper and arrange about 6 sheets horizontally on the wall.

On the left-hand side, create a column labeled 'Actors.' These are the individuals or groups that interact with the product. You'll list all the actors under this heading later.

On the right-hand side, write out the end goal or objective these actors have after they've gone through the entire customer journey.

Across the top, from left to right, write the different stages of the customer journey. For instance,  

Business-to-consumer like buying a Pet grooming service: Discover, Learn, and Use. 

e-commerce like buying Bluetooth speakers: discover, try, buy, use, and seek support.

Luxury items like buying a car, the stages: education, research, evaluation, and justification.

Business-to-business: purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, and advocacy.

Principles For Drawing the Journey Map

Remember that the map should represent the current state, not new ideas about how the product should work. Unless you’re envisioning a North Star and making assumptions about what this will look like. 

Keep the map high-level and avoid including every tiny detail. This exercise aims to provide a big-picture view of problem area selection. To prevent going too deep into detail, timebox the exercise.

The map doesn't have to be perfect or entirely correct. If debates arise about step order or complex functions, simplify and move on.

• Unveil Opportunities to Enhance and Delight Customers Lives

Step 2: Draw the Journey Map Details

The goal is to identify customer pain points or team inefficiencies.  We will use the Discover, Learn, and Use journey as an example.  

Ask the participant to jot down the actors. Try to limit the number to four at most and group them if needed. (Ask participants to help you group them or  ask them to vote on the four most important actors.)

Define the end goal for the main actor(s) .  

Ask: What does each actor want to achieve with our product or service? 

Tell participants to write their answers on sticky notes (one idea per sticky)

Note: If there is more than one goal per actor, ask participants to vote on the most important goal.

Fill in the map, starting with the first step, let's say the ’Discover' phase. Capture how (actions) actors find out about your product without going into excessive detail.

Continue with the next one, like the 'Learn' phase, outlining the steps actors take once they discover your product.

Then, follow up with the final phase (in this case), the, ‘Use” phase. 

Step 3: Mindset and Emotions

With your journey map in front of you, you can use mindsets and emotions to pinpoint problem areas, devise solutions, and commit to experiments and changes. 

Two Definitions: 

Mindse ts are essentially the thoughts, queries, motivations, and information cravings that users have at various points in their journey. Ideally, these come directly from customer research, capturing their exact words and sentiments.

Emotions , you know what emotions are. How your customers feel. Think of it as a layer of context that helps us pinpoint moments when users are ecstatic versus those times when they might be feeling a bit frustrated.

Ok, back to facilitating

Ask participants to write on a sticky note -What are the customer's thoughts through each of the journey phases (One idea per sticky note).  When everyone is done, place them on the corresponding phase on the map. 

Ask participants to draw a smiley, angry, or sad face (one per sticky note) and place them along the journey map. 

Picture Emotions as a single line stretched across the different phases of the journey. This line essentially acts as a kind of emotional rollercoaster, showing the highs and lows of the user experience.

Step 4: Opportunities

Look at the map and ask participants to vote-

Where are the biggest opportunities?

Finish by asking them to vote on the top three they think would have the biggest impact. 

So, in a nutshell, my friend, journey mapping is like a magical tool that gives you a full, 360-degree view of what your customers go through. 

It's like a treasure map where you find spots of joy and, okay, maybe a few hidden traps of frustration during their journey with you.

But here's the cool part: when we do this right, it's like shining a spotlight on areas where you can swoop in, rescue your customers from their pain points, and find solutions to challenges that matter to bring everything together seamlessly. 

The end result? You make the people you serve' lives better. And that, my friend, is what it's all about. 😊🌟

P.S. Want to equip your Facilitation skills or Boost your strategy? click here to book a free, zero-obligation discovery call me to discuss how together we can innovate in a way hat doesn’t destroy the world.

Thank you for reading Magic Play. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Ready for more?

Deliver New Value to Your Customers With Future-State Journey Mapping

Are you using journey mapping to design a better future-state experience and to deliver new value for your customers – with your customers?

One of a dozen or so  journey mapping myths  that I’ve written about over the last few years is that you can’t start the journey mapping process with mapping the future state. You know the drill by now:  you can’t transform something you don’t understand . If you don’t know what’s going well and what’s not in the current experience, how will you know what to redesign and what to continue doing in the future?

Journey mapping is a tool and a process. The process I use with my clients has six steps, which you can read about in  6 Steps from Journey Maps to Outcomes . The fifth step in the process is Ideate, in which you’ll  ideate  solutions to customer and backstage pain points and then design the future state.

Here’s a bit more detail about what this step includes. You will:

• Ideate solutions for the current pain points your customers are experiencing
• Design the ideal future-state experience
• Conduct root cause analyses
• Ideate backstage and behind-the-scenes policies and processes to solve these (root cause) problems
• Identify people, tools, and systems that are problematic, as well, and ideate solutions that will help you deliver the future-state experience
• Design service delivery capabilities of the future experience

As you probably already know, future-state maps are different from current-state maps. They:

• Are used to design tomorrow’s differentiated experience
• Are rooted in creativity and ideals
• Use ideation to identify solutions for customer pain points
• Add/incorporate listening posts into the experience, as needed
• Are driven by the CX vision
• Help you innovate new products and services
• Allow you to envision and design how you’ll deliver new value for your customers at minimal risk because you’re testing them on paper first

Too many companies stop at current-state journey mapping –  assuming it’s been done right  – and never move on to service blueprinting or to future-state design, choosing instead to make tactical and cosmetic improvements identified in the current-state map and leave it at that. Future-state mapping is an important piece of the journey mapping process and cannot be overlooked if you want to design a better overall experience – and deliver new value –  going forward for your customers.

You’ll find more information about future-state mapping and how to conduct future-state mapping workshops in my new book,  Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in  Customer  Experience (and at the Heart of the Business),   available next month!

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.  -Unknown

Annette Franz is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, consultant, and speaker. She’s on the verge of publishing her  first book , Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business). Stay tuned for that! In the meantime,  sign up for our newsletter  for updates, insights, and other great content that you can use to up your CX game. 

Image courtesy by Pixabay.

Read the original post here .

• Annette Franz (Gleneicki) , customer experience , customer experience design , customer journey mapping
• August 18, 2019

Annette Franz

• Occupation :  Customer Experience Consultant
• Organisation : CX Journey

Annette blogs at CX Journey, where she shares her passion for helping companies understand the importance of the employee experience and its role in delivering an exceptional customer experience, as well as how to transform their cultures to ensure the customer is at the centre of every conversation. She was recognized as one of “The 100 Most Influential Tech Women on Twitter” by Business Insider and has been recognized by several organizations as a top influencer in Customer Experience. She is an active Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) member, as a CX Expert, CX Mentor, and a SoCal Local Networking Team Lead; she also serves as an executive officer on the association’s Board of Directors. And finally, Annette is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and has been CEM certified, as well. You can learn more about Annette by visiting  CX Journey  or by visiting her About Me page. 

• Blog: https://www.cx-journey.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/annettefranz
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CXJourney

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Article • 9 min read

Designing Future-State Customer Journeys

Planning the ideal experience for your customers.

By the Mind Tools Content Team

"The customer experience is the next competitive battleground." – Jerry Gregoire, former SVP, Dell

Chances are, you care deeply about what your customers think about your organization, and you try to make their experience of dealing with you as good as it can be.

Perhaps you already track how your customers engage and interact with your organization, and you strive to improve those areas where their needs are not being met.

But while you fix mistakes and plug existing service gaps, are you looking ahead to how you can design and implement a completely new customer experience?

In this article, we look at how you can use future-state customer experience mapping to create a new vision of your customers' journey.

What Is Future-State Customer Experience Mapping?

Current-state customer experience mapping (or journey mapping, as it's sometimes known) is valuable for helping organizations to understand and improve their existing customer experiences. In other words, you look at how your customers feel when they interact with you at different "touchpoints," such as online searches, telephone conversations, in-store experiences, help desk interactions, and product demonstrations.

Future-state mapping is a tool for reinventing these experiences and designing completely new ones that differentiate you from your competitors.

With it, you can envision and plan better outcomes for your customers. You can predict what they'll do, what they'll think, and how they'll interact whenever they encounter your products and services. In an era when only 37 percent of customers feel understood by retailers, ensuring that your customers enjoy a great experience with your organization can set you apart from the crowd.

How to Design Your Customer's Journey

Future-state customer experience mapping involves a different process from current-state mapping. The aim is to articulate a vision, rather than to record an existing journey, so it's less grounded in research and more driven by business strategy and visualization.

Follow these seven steps to design an experience that will "wow" your future customers:

Step 1. Form a Mapping Stakeholder Group

Your first task is to assemble a team to see the mapping process through, from discussing ideas to implementing them.

The team should have a variety of skills and experience. For example, business owners can align teams around a common vision, project managers can design and oversee individual work streams, and external customer-experience professionals can help to foster a customer-centric vision. Also, remember to include people from those parts of the organization that may be impacted by the project.

Cast a wide net to draw in expertise, from subject matter experts and business analysts to star employees and customers. In particular, seek out creative people who can generate vibrant, dynamic, innovative ideas.

Step 2. Map Your Current-State Customer Experience

Your team will need to be involved in mapping your current-state customer experience before it looks at the future state. That means seeing your business through your customers' eyes, and you can find out how to do this with our article, Customer Experience Mapping .

The analysis that you perform at the end of your current-state mapping exercise will help you to see, for example, where you're losing actual or potential customers. From there, you can "pivot" from current to future mapping.

Step 3. Define Your Business Goals and Target Customers

Here, ask what kind of future-state map you need. For example, you may want to completely redesign your touchpoints and create a new, game-changing set of customer experiences, which you believe will win you a greater market share.

It's important to pinpoint who you're creating an ideal future for. You may plan to "up your game" for an existing customer type, for instance, or to serve an entirely new one.

It's important to take your resources, technical capability, and industry conditions into account. The future state that you want must be financially viable, technically feasible, and organizationally achievable, as well as relevant to your customers.

You'll need to get senior stakeholders to sign off any particularly adventurous or ambitious customer journey project. The consequences for you could be serious if you go "full steam ahead" without their approval and support – you may be seen as coming up with ideas that are wild or impractical, and this may leave you looking foolish.

Step 4. Generate New Ideas

At this stage, your team can start to explore new ideas in depth for your future customer experience, and to pinpoint the functional and emotional goals for each touchpoint in the customer journey.

Your objectives, and your insights into the existing customer experience, should be your starting point. From there, you can look at the new sources of customer value that you hope to achieve. Developing empathy with your customers – that is, putting yourself in their shoes – is important at this stage, so that you can better understand their likely experience.

You can use different kinds of idea-generation tools to find the ones that work best for you. You could try Brainstorming or using Mind Maps® .

Essential to this part of the process is "ideation." This is a process of exploring ideas, suggestions and possible solutions, repeating multiple rounds of evaluation until you've identified your top ideas.

Step 5: Map Your Future-State Customer Experience

Here, the aim is to group your ideas, and organize them into a "journey" along which your customers will progress – seen from their perspective.

You need to turn your ideas and concepts into something "physical," whether that be a storyboard , model or diagram.

You can format your customer-experience map in any number of ways. Our article on Swim Lane Diagrams can help you to create your map. You can also use online mapping tools, such as Smaply ™ and UXPressia ™.

Remember, though, that you're expressing a vision – one that you'll need everybody in your organization to embrace. So a good general rule is to keep it simple, and minimize your use of specialist symbols.

Step 6: Validate Your Map

To check that the future state you've devised will deliver value for your customers, you'll need them to see it and comment on it. Get their feedback on what looks good – and what doesn't – and go back to the drawing board if necessary. Our article Using Focus Groups highlights a five-step process for gathering customer feedback.

Step 7: Put Your Map to Work

You need to put your map to work for it to be more than just a theoretical exercise. Here are some tips to help you do this:

• Build executive support . Your future state will need to deliver value for your organization as well as your customers, so it's crucial that senior stakeholders buy in to the project. You're far more likely to win their backing if they've contributed to it, hence the importance of including them in your stakeholder group or inviting them to take part in brainstorming sessions.
• Pilot your future-state experience . Trialing some key aspects will help you to gauge their practicality and effectiveness, and fine-tune your plans.
• Create new capabilities . Your future customer experience may require investment in new resources. You may need to invest in new technologies or recruit additional team members, for example. Make sure that the benefits you'll deliver will comprehensively outweigh the cost of achieving them. See our article on NVP analysis for a robust way of doing this.
• Plan your roll-out . Limitations on time or resources may restrict your ability to launch a future state in one go, so set priorities based on meeting your business objectives, working within your current abilities, and delivering the most value. [2]

Future-state customer experience mapping is a tool for elevating customer experiences from good to great. When it's done well, it can build stronger, more enduring relationships between organizations and their customers, and create greater value for both.

Your first step is to assemble a team of stakeholders to take on the mapping process. This team then maps your current-state customer experience, and from there you set objectives and generate ideas. These ideas then need to be shaped into a beginning-to-end "journey" that you can validate, trial and, finally, roll out.

[1] Econsultancy, (2015). Brands think they provide great customer experience, consumers disagree [report]. Available here . [Accessed December 12, 2022.]

[2] UKFundraising, (2015). 7 Simple Steps for Developing Effective Supporter Journeys  [online]. Available here . [Accessed February 22, 2017.]

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Complete Guide to Creating a Customer Journey Map 

Conducting a customer journey mapping workshop does a few key things. It facilitates a common understanding between team members, uncovers insights from the user’s journey and explores potential opportunities for growth and improvement.

In order to make your customers happy and build products that solve real problems, you need to understand what users are experiencing when they come into contact with your product or service.

Current State vs. Future State Customer Journey Maps

There are two types of customer journey maps: a current-state customer journey map and a future-state customer journey map. The current-state journey map visualizes the user’s current experience with your product or service, while the future-state journey map visualizes the user’s future experience.

Before beginning, you should define the scope of the customer journey map. You will most likely want to start out at a very high level and review the whole customer experience.

For example, a high-level customer journey map outlines the process of taking a flight from discovering the user needs to go on the trip, to booking the trip, to boarding the plane and finally the billing process.

A fully detailed customer journey map can give a deeper level of user insights by outlining the entire experience on the plane. You will map out when the user first boarded the plan, how they found their seat, the in-flight announcements, snack service and finally the baggage claim process.

In this post, we are going to focus on a high-level, end-to-end customer journey map. 

Preparing for the Customer Journey Mapping Workshop 

Prior to starting the workshop, you want to make sure you have a few things prepared to make it successful.

Identify the primary persona

It is important that the group has a primary persona in mind. When working in user experience design it is important to focus on one primary user. Other disciplines like marketing will have many personas, each having different demographics and characteristics that they can target.

Gather as much research as you can and make sure everyone in the room is briefed on the latest research. You can pull information from previous customer satisfaction surveys, support logs, analytics, competitive intelligence and any other previous customer research that you have conducted. Everyone involved should have a good base understanding of the customer you are creating the journey for. If you are starting without any research, we would recommend you do some research first to guide the conversation. You can conduct moderated interviews , unmoderated interviews, contextual inquiries , surveys, diary studies etc.

Assemble your team

You want people representing all functional areas of the business including development, design, marketing, and operations to join the session. This will be different for each product or service but think about the key areas of business. Ideally, you want a comprehensive team but you don’t want more than 8 people since it can derail productivity.

Prep the materials

It is often helpful to have a template to guide the workshop. There are multiple different templates that you can use but most of them have relatively the same components and will get the job done. It will also be helpful to have a big whiteboard or a print out of the template to stick on a wall. Also, during the workshop, give everyone in the room a pad of sticky notes and a sharpie.

Customer Journey Map Template  

The customer journey map template is a large grid. Here is a link to download a blank template so you can fill it out during your session. The top of the grid, outlines the different stages the customer goes through while engaging with your product or service.  

Across the Top of the Template

1. awareness.

This is when the customer is trying to learn about the potential solutions to their problems and recognize they have a need.

2. Researching

This is when the customer is researching potential solutions. This varies widely by product. With some products, customers make instant purchasing decisions while with other products customers spend hours researching the options since there may be high switching costs.

3. Selection

This is when the customer makes the conscious decision to use the product.

4. Delivery

Once the user has selected the product, this describes how they receive it.

5. Follow Up

What follow up does the company do after the customer has consumed the product or service? In this box, make sure to focus on your company’s retention strategy. The goal is to push users into being an advocate of your product .

Down left side of the Template

This is what the customer is doing during each of the above stages. What are the customers actual behaviors and actions?

2. Thinking

Try to understand what the customer is thinking. What are their thoughts, feelings, motivations and needs at each stage?

3. Touch points

These are the points of interaction between the user and the product or company. Is there specific communication or messaging to reference? Is that communication through a mobile app or website?

4. Customer Pains

What things do we know are pains for the user at each stage of the process. Our goal is to address those pains and to fix them in future designs.

5. Customer Gains

These are things that are currently delighting the customer. They are things that make them happy. Ideally, we want to keep doing these things as you continue to improve the product .

6. Opportunities

This is a summary of the problems and questions customers have. Identify potential opportunities where you can deliver better service. These are your action steps coming out of the customer journey mapping session. They will drive your product roadmap.

Role of the Facilitator 

As the facilitator, you should start by having the group brainstorm, using the boxes as guidelines, starting with the awareness box. The group can write out each activity on a sticky note and paste it in the corresponding box on the customer journey map template .

You should keep moving box by box until you finish the journey map. As the facilitator, you want everyone to work together and feed off one another.

Following the workshop, you should capture everything written on the sticky notes into a shareable document.

Remember, the customer journey map is a living document and it should evolve and change as the product or service matures. Make sure to display the output in a prominent place to be referenced often.

Download a free customer journey template here

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Making your Journey Map Actionable and Creating Change: 301

In this three-part blog series, we’re breaking down one of our favourite service design tools: Customer Journey Maps! We cover:

Customer Journey Mapping 101: What are customer journey maps, and why do you need them?

Customer Journey Mapping 201: How to Research and Build a Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Mapping 301: Designing for the future, evolving your map, and making it actionable (this post)

In this final instalment, we explore tools and techniques to ensure that the customer journey maps you’ve carefully researched and crafted are highly actionable, and that they continue to evolve alongside your organization or team.

Here are our TOP FIVE methods for really utilizing customer journey maps to their full potential, and communicating this powerful tool across teams.

1. host a town hall meeting.

A “town hall” meeting is a gathering that brings together the whole organization (likely being held over Zoom these days…) and they typically take place on a monthly or quarterly basis. For your next town hall or company-wide meeting, get your customer journey map on the agenda.

Email the meeting chairs, or whoever holds power over the agenda––it’s really worth sharing your journey map with everyone, and getting folks excited!

Prepare a short but compelling presentation about how you crafted the journey map and how it can be used. Ensure you tell a story, since a journey map is a very powerful visual storytelling tool.

Communicate that you are open for feedback. Let your colleagues know that you welcome their advice and ideas for further developing the journey map.

Incorporate this feedback wherever it makes sense to do so. (Note: Actual customer research should reign supreme. Don’t feel compelled to incorporate feedback from others unless it is truly useful.) This activity is still a good way to allow everyone to feel involved and part of the larger process. It will also get other departments interested and promotes collaboration instead of competitiveness across teams.

2. Print It Out and Hang It Up in the Office

In Part 2 of our Journey Mapping series , we mention that there is nothing more impressive than a huge, colourful, 10 foot customer journey map banner hung in the office corridor or in a space with high foot traffic. This can be another great way to encourage and gain feedback from coworkers, as people will be more likely to stop and examine the journey map during lunch or with a coffee in hand.

The feedback you’re looking for here is more about the “look and feel” of the map, or ideas for improvement and new opportunities. As we discuss above, try not to incorporate feedback that will contradict the actual customer research you performed to build your journey map.

Print your map out in full size at your local print shop––we always prefer a matte finish––and post it up in a common area.

Leave sticky notes (and hang a Sharpie from a string) nearby so that people can add remarks, questions, or additional information to the journey map itself.

Note about COVID-19: Since many of us aren’t at the office anymore, include the journey map in your organization’s internal newsletter, post it to the Intranet, or share within Slack teams––the point is to find the best way to internally circulate the journey map and ask for feedback.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Outwitly | UX & Service Design (@outwitly)

Click through for a sample customer journey map poster…

3. Find Champions

Champions are people who are excited about a project and who are willing to bring it up in conversations with others at your organization. You must choose your customer journey map champions wisely! Selecting the right people to pass your message along is critical to gain buy-in for new initiatives spurred by the insights from your customer journey map.

Identify 10 people in your organization who are: positive, self-starters, charismatic, and who seem to have friends or know people across departments. Remember, these are not necessarily executives or managers. You’ll want to have a good mix of different seniority levels, folks from different departments, and so on. The only requirements are that they must be excited, optimistic, and have cross-departmental collaborations or influence to be really effective.

Hold a meeting with these 10 people. Let them know you are inviting them to be part of this special project.

Make the “ask”. Introduce your customer journey map and all the research that went into it, and explain what you’d like the next steps and outcomes to be––and how these 10 people can help. Next, give them at least three specific items they can act on. For example, you might ask them to host a meeting with their teams and introduce the research insights within their departments.

Omit anyone who says they are not interested in helping.

Send around a monthly email with updates regarding the customer journey map, new initiatives that are kicking off, and/or any changes/improvements that have been updated.

4. Develop a Future-State Map

Using your “Current State” Customer Journey Map to develop an “Ideal State” or “Future State” Journey Map is a great way to collaboratively solve some of the frustrating or inefficient parts of the current customer/user experience. This activity will allow you to imagine what the service or user experience would look like if the journey was seamless, optimized, and memorable. Future-state mapping is an activity that should involve many different departments, and it can really bring your vision to life. You’ll discover exactly what needs to change by identifying gaps between the current and future states, and then you can set a plan to implement those changes (see Step 5 below).

Bring a cross-departmental team together (consider involving your Champions) and schedule a workshop to brainstorm the future-state journey.

In this workshop, list each pain point identified in the current state map, and use these as a basis for idea generation. Try to transform all pain points into opportunities.

Collaboratively re-imagine the journey. Consider drawing/writing directly onto a printed copy of your current state map with Sharpies––mark it up! Cross out phases or touchpoints that don’t make sense, and ask “How could this be better for the user? Simpler? Easier? More memorable?”

Redraw your future-state journey map with opportunities and action items to make them real. Visualize the map and make it beautiful as you did with your current state journey map––and then circulate it (start with Step 1 above).

5. Prioritize and Take Action

Customer journey maps also have the benefit of directly highlighting pain points and major opportunities to help you improve your customer/user or employee experience––and these can be turned into initiatives and prioritized. For each opportunity identified in the journey map, assign a related action item/project, and try to give each action item an owner with an associated timeline.

Identify and list all easily identifiable opportunities from the journey map.

Rank each opportunity by effort and value (see diagram above). This will help determine how to prioritize your initiatives. We also recommend using data from the journey map to help you decide what is critical to the customer experience and what would just be nice to have.

Create a roadmap with milestones and dates based on your prioritized actions and opportunities.

Add project owners for each action item to generate accountability.

And there you have it! With this three-part series, you now possess ALL the tools and know-how you need to research, craft, and communicate a powerful customer journey map to get your products, services, and organization moving forward.

Resources we like…

Mapping Experience: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams by Jim Kalbach. Outwitly CEO/founder Sara Fortier’s work is featured on page 97.

Start Innovating with Future-State Journey Mapping by Tony Costa

How to Get Key Stakeholders to Champion your Project

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Current-State vs. Future-State Journey Mapping

Pretty much everyone in the UX industry has come across a customer journey map at some point or another. A customer journey map is a useful tool that helps to outline the customers’ journey, from start to finish. It covers the customer's initial contact with the product, through their process of engagement and even covering longtime usage. Customer journey maps help provide useful insight into a user’s feelings, motivations, and questions when interacting with that product. Customer journey maps are usually carried out in similar ways and then presented as an infographic. However, there is a new and innovative take on the customer journey map that can offer ingenious insights into the customers’ journey and can help to create a brand new experience.

       The model of customer journey mapping that we are all pretty familiar with is referred to as current-state journey mapping. Current-state journey mapping largely focuses on identifying and problem-solving the various pain points that exist throughout the customer journey, from initial contact to repeated use. This process draws largely on customers’ as we know them: relying on their existing behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. The goal is to outline the customer's experience and modify it so that it can better fit the customers’ needs and wants.

        More recently, people have turned their attention away from current-state journey mapping to future-state journey mapping. Unlike current-state journey mapping, future-state journey mapping focuses on creating new experiences for the user, rather than repairing existing ones. It focuses on unlocking new areas of customer interaction and value, rather than highlighting pain points or areas of difficulty. This doesn’t mean that current-state journey maps are now rendered useless; current-state journey mapping is used as valuable input when creating future-state journey maps. As implied by the usage of the word “future”, future-state journey mapping is all about moving forward and creating new journeys for the customers.

      This might all sound confusing, so here is a breakdown of the ways in which current-state journey mapping and future-state journey mapping differ from each other:

Current-State Journey Map:

• Used to document and get a shared organizational understanding of the customer experience end-to-end
• Focused on current customer interactions
• The foundation for building a current-state journey map is collected Data
• They are fact-based
• Helps map customer perceptions
• Allows for incremental improvements of customer experience  

Future-State Journey Map:

• The goal is to create new customer values and experiences
• Helps explore customer expectations
• Driven by creativity and innovation as opposed to data
• Can be used to uncover new opportunities to enhance the customer experience
• Rather than relying on objective data, allows room for subjective interpretations
• Includes customer desires and hopes, rather than just their experiences

   Future-state journey mapping offers a new, fresh and innovative take on our traditional current-state journey mapping. Current-state journey mapping is still a very useful tool, and as mentioned earlier, can greatly help to inform a future-state journey map. Future-state journey mapping is more focused on creating an entirely new experience for customers, rather than working to improve an old one. Future-state journey mapping is all about moving forward and creating unique and exciting new experiences for our customers.  

 Read also:   How To: Future-State Journey Map

READ MORE:  Customer Journey Map: AI Edition , 11 Tips to Develop Your User Empathy Journey Map , 3 Tips to Activate the Innovative Side of Your Employees , Getting Started With Customer Journey Mapping

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Future-state journey map

A journey map that describes a vision for the user experience you want to create.

• When used alongside a current state journey map, you can perform a gap analysis and then plan a program of design sprints to make the changes required to reach the vision.
• When combined with user scenarios, a future-state journey map can be used to bring a user experience vision to life.
• You want to define and communicate how people should experience your service or product over time.
• You want to build a strategy or a vision for the future.
• You’re prototyping and you want to try to test, validate and define a vision for the future that is desirable.
• You want to perform a gap analysis to help figure out the amount of work required to reach the vision.

Future-state journey maps are most practical when they reflect a single persona’s journey. If you have multiple market segments – each with a different persona who will take a different path or journey – it’s useful to create a unique future-state journey map for each persona, especially if you intend to tailor the user experience for each market segment.

Key terminology

Step: A specific action or activity a user does to achieve a goal such as contact the call centre or download a form.

Channel: Ways a user interacts with a service provider such as call centre, app, online or face-to-face.

Touchpoint: The intersection between a step and a channel (an action and a method) such as downloading the form online.

Stage: A phase or a group of steps the user goes through to achieve their goal such as search or register.

Gap analysis: An analysis of the differences between the current state and the vision for the future, to see what changes need to be made to achieve the vision.

Updated 5 July 2023

Invisible Borders

Mapping social boundaries and spatial practices in the city, invisible borders: presentation + performance.

A presentation, interactive exhibit and performances emerging from the Invisible Borders Workshop hosted at the Strelka Institute, examining unseen borders (urban, social and mythical) in Moscow.

Mapping and Games: Experimental Participatory Research

Our workshop incorporated non-traditional ideas of mapping and games, using them as processes of investigation and to create interactive, educational outputs.

Body, Borders, & the City

Videos from the bodies and borders investigation at Kurskaya station:

Bodies Under the Bridge

It seems inevitable that an investigation on invisible borders would bring one to encounter the self and the body as the ultimate boundary control center.

Research Simulator: The Kremlin’s Invisible Borders

In the past, all of the main public functions of the city were concentrated at the Kremlin. Despite the fact that the Tsar’s residence was also located there, city residents had free access to spaces within the walls.

Research Simulator: Red October

A high-profile site in the heart of Moscow with a rich legacy of manufacturing, in recent years it has emerged as a hub of media, arts and culture.

Research Simulator: Slavyanski Mir

A vibrant market on the edge of Moscow (and a gateway between the old and new city), preceded by a history of markets as contested ethnic enclaves and informal economy networks. Slavyanskiy Mir represents a bordered yet borderless world on the edge of Moscow.

Research Simulator: Kurskaya Station

A gateway to Moscow located on the site of its former historic walls, the area around Kurskaya station is a great place for observational studies and to understand the impact of planning and architectural borders.

Typology of Borders in Slavyanskiy Mir

Slavyanskiy Mir is filled with a variety of visible and invisible borders between spaces, people, and goods. many of these boundaries are quite visible at the human scale, such as this permeable boundary of informally placed stones. Others are less visible. Here are a list of borders identified form our site visit.

Day 6: Mapping Slavyanskiy Mir

As part of our collaborative investigation of Slavyanskiy Mir on the 9th, we’re creating a map of the market and starting a Slavyanskiy Mir page on Wikipedia.

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Deliver New Value to Your Customers with Future-State Journey Mapping

by Annette Franz | Aug 14, 2019 | customer experience , customer experience design , customer experience journey , customer journey , CX vision , cxjourney , journey map , journey mapping , service blueprint , Uncategorized | 0 comments

Are you using journey mapping to design a better future-state experience and to deliver new value for your customers – with your customers?

One of a dozen or so journey mapping myths that I’ve written about over the last few years is that you can’t start the journey mapping process with mapping the future state. You know the drill by now: you can’t transform something you don’t understand . If you don’t know what’s going well and what’s not in the current experience, how will you know what to redesign and what to continue doing in the future?

Journey mapping is a tool and a process. The process I use with my clients has six steps, which you can read about in 6 Steps from Journey Maps to Outcomes . The fifth step in the process is Ideate , in which you’ll ideate solutions to customer and backstage pain points and then design the future state.

Here’s a bit more detail about what this step includes. You will:

• Ideate solutions for the current pain points your customers are experiencing
• Design the ideal future-state experience
• Conduct root cause analyses
• Ideate backstage and behind-the-scenes policies and processes to solve these (root cause) problems
• Identify people, tools, and systems that are problematic, as well, and ideate solutions that will help you deliver the future-state experience
• Design service delivery capabilities of the future experience

As you probably already know, future-state maps are different from current-state maps. They:

• Are used to design tomorrow’s differentiated experience
• Are rooted in creativity and ideals
• Use ideation to identify solutions for customer pain points
• Add/incorporate listening posts into the experience, as needed
• Are driven by the CX vision
• Help you innovate new products and services
• Allow you to envision and design how you’ll deliver new value for your customers at minimal risk because you’re testing them on paper first

Too many companies stop at current-state journey mapping – assuming it’s been done right – and never move on to service blueprinting or to future-state design, choosing instead to make tactical and cosmetic improvements identified in the current-state map and leave it at that. Future-state mapping is an important piece of the journey mapping process and cannot be overlooked if you want to design a better overall experience – and deliver new value –  going forward for your customers.

You’ll find more information about future-state mapping and how to conduct future-state mapping workshops in my new book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of the Business) , available next month!

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power . -Unknown

Annette Franz, CCXP is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, speaker, and author. In September 2019, she published her first book , Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business); it’s available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats. Sign up for our newsletter for updates, insights, and other great content that you can use to up your CX game .

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Ideating the Future-State Customer Experience

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I’ve been know to say, “You can’t transform something you don’t understand.” You don’t want to change things that are working well or that create value for your customers. So know the current state and what to fix and what to maintain before designing the future state. Know the current state so that you can make near-term fixes and improvements while you’re re-imagining and redesigning the future state, which can take some time.

In future-state journey mapping, you ideate—with customers—the ideal future experience and map out that experience, which then becomes the blueprint for implementation. The future-state map shows what the customer  will  be doing, thinking, and feeling (in the future, ideal experience) throughout the respective interactions with the brand.

This table outlines differences between current state and future-state maps.

Future-state journey mapping serves many purposes, including:

• Identifying and examining future experiences or journeys in collaboration with real customers
• Co-creating and designing the ideal experience with customers
• Co-creating and designing a differentiated experience with customers
• Envisioning what the experience could look like in the future at minimal risk because it’s tested first on paper

So, where to begin?

I  previously wrote  about future-state mapping and future-state workshops but kept it pretty high level. Here’s a bit more detail.

START WITH IDEATION

Start your future-state workshops with an ideation session. In your current state mapping work, you identified specific customer experience pain points that need to be redesigned. Focusing on those pain points, ask customers (yes, you’ll have customers in this workshop!) to brainstorm ideas for a better future experience. What would that look like? What should it include? What are competitors or other industries doing differently that delivers a much better experience? (In your pre-workshop prep meeting, ask customers to bring artifacts – examples of where they’ve seen this pain point solved in a way that simplifies the experience for them.) What is the ideal experience? I always say, think rainbows and unicorns. Ask them to think outside the box. Think about a totally different experience. It’s OK. Don’t panic, and don’t put limitations on what they can suggest. Don’t provide any parameters. As they’re working away, ask customers not to judge what others are saying or writing down; instead, build on others’ ideas and make them better or simply evolve them. Go for quantity over quality.

Oftentimes, as an example and to put the exercise into context, I’ll offer up  Airbnb’s 11-star experience framework , first shared by CEO Brian Chesky. ( Here’s another resource  that will be helpful.)

THEN GROUP THE IDEAS

Once customers have jotted down and/or shared all of their ideas, the next step is to group ideas into like themes. Are there any ideas that naturally belong together? Some ideas might fit into multiple groupings or themes. They can group the ones that are saying the same thing; they can eliminate ideas that just don’t make sense or don’t seem to be a good fit, as deemed by the group; or they can expand and clarify ideas to figure out where they belong.

NEXT, REVIEW THE IDEAS

As a next step, have customers review, vote on, and prioritize the ideas – based on their preferences. The goal is to identify the nuggets that thread through various groups or that stand out as best next steps. Once prioritized, they can then focus on a theme or a grouping to incorporate into the future-state journey mapping process.

TIME TO MAP

With the ideation session, you’ve primed customers for the problem they are solving and the experience they are redesigning. It’s time to get up and map the future state. They’ve thrown out some great ideas, and they’ve all been captured, prioritized, and voted on. Let’s see how they put it all together to design the new experience.

HOW WILL YOU PRIORITIZE?

You’ve received a lot of awesome ideas from your customers during the ideation session. They’ve voted on their favorites based solely on their preferences; they’ve not taken into account how you might prioritize the ideas given a variety of factors, including those that I mention  in this post :

• cost to implement
• time to implement
• effort to implement
• resources required to implement
• impact on the business
• type of customers impacted
• volume of customers impacted

Here’s a tip, though:  impact on the customer  should always be a part of your prioritization framework.

But let’s pause for a moment and think about this: don’t automatically and immediately discount an idea because you think it’s going to cost a lot or because it seems so far-fetched. Do your homework. Get your hands on some data. These have to be data-driven decisions. The ROI may be there; do the math first. At the same time, don’t stunt creativity and innovation by using the same logic and reasoning and processes and ideas that got you into this mess! I’m reminded of  these cartoons by Tom Fishburne  about design thinking and some of the limitations people put on this work.

As Einstein said:  We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them . That could not be more true in this situation! You might actually need to spend a little bit to gain a lot. If you truly want to be innovative, if you truly want to differentiate, if you truly want to make the experience better, you might need to get a little uncomfortable now for some longer-term gains.

If you want to build something that’s truly viral, you have to create a total mindfuck experience that you tell everyone about.  -Brian Chesky, Airbnb

Related:  Four Actions To Take On Customer Effort Feedback

2 Issue 2 : Local-Eyes!

Partizaning's first year - an exhibition in December at Vostochnaya Gallery showing a year's worth of projects. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

Partizaning: participatory art, research and creative urban activism

Partizaning leverages artistic interventions in Moscow’s public spaces as tools for social research and transformation, blurring the boundaries between everyday life, urbanism, activism and art.

P artizaning (v): public art practices which strategically challenge, shape, and reinvent urban and social realities.

The last several years have witnessed increased visibility and importance given to DIY cultures and tactical urbanism in cities across the USA, Canada and Europe. This is partially as a response to the financial crisis and limited resources for city maintenance and development, and resistance to the forms of neoliberal urban development. Active, creative citizens have begun to address the inadequacies of government functions, using temporary, creative interventions to suggest alternative realities.

DIY cultures are not new: most recently, they have long existed in Latin America, parts of Asia and in the former USSR (as well as other parts of the world, at different points in time), where capital-led urbanism was not the norm and people lived in circumstances of scarcity. These DIY traditions have demonstrated people’s ingenuity as the best solution in times of necessity; people can invent and deftly make do, especially in the city.

The tactical urbanism movement – led mostly by planners and architects – has built on DIY action in a strategic struggle for bottom up or grassroots urban planning. The same phenomenon is referred to as ‘urban hacking’ in parts of Europe. But what all of these actions share are active resistance and citizen participation in the processes and developments in our cities.

Partizaning’s first documentation exhibition in Amsterdam. (Image (c) Partizaning)

In Russia, we are witnessing a form of strategic, bottom-up urbanism being led by artists who work in the streets and writers, rather than by architects and planners. Creative people are working in public spaces to express themselves and to create dialogues with authorities and with other citizens. In this article I discuss the work I am doing as a member of the project Partizaning, leveraging artistic interventions in public space as a tool for social research and transformation; blurring the boundaries between everyday life, urbanism, activism and art.

Our idea is not to propose a new form of DIY urbanism, but to transform the idea of a top-down, expert planned city into one where residents are active stakeholders in the place they live; a space where they have a right to lead the lives they choose. I explain how we connect the ideas of DIY-ism and participation, as well as how Partizaning is a strategy which is aligned, but different from, tactical urbanism and conventional social art practices by its connection of research and process of creation.

In Context: Urban Planning in Russia

Partizaning’s map of the Moscow Metro which promotes our ideas of affordability, pedestrianism and walkability. (Image (c) Partizaning)

Russian cities are unique, complex entities. Following the revolution in 1917, all Russian land was nationalized and socialized, transferred to State or local authorities. The houses once belonging to the bourgeoisie were divided into accommodation for the proletariat. The collapse of a traditional spatial order required new planning approaches. At the time, ideas of a ‘socialist city’ were debated in terms of the concepts of two groups: the urbanists and dis-urbanists. Dis-urbanists wanted to dissolve the difference between town and country, while Urbanists proposed a contained expansion and planning of existing cities. The Garden City, an idea that flourished in the West, also became a starting point for the Soviet suburb. All this was resolved by the top-down functional and central planning in the form of high-rise apartments with wide-ranging amenities like schools and clinics located nearby. These ‘microrayon’ structures continue to exist today and present just one aspect or challenge of contemporary urban living in Russian cities.

A game about urban tactics which we created and disseminated online and in print. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

After the collapse of the USSR, the country saw the growth of economy and a construction boom as a result of privatization. The Western model of a city and urban development began to take root; but after 20 years of post-Soviet development, most people still live in a reality which created by and for a centrally planned economy. How is this shift to a capital system possible without removing all ideals of social equity?

Reversing urban gentrification with a DIY platform and discussion in Dusseldorf. (Photo (c) Christian Ahlborn)

Russian cities as they now exist are struggling with remnants of Soviet-era urban planning and the development of a neoliberal form of the city. Although highly organized, these plans were not created for people to experience life in the city. Architects and bureaucratic planners promoted ideals like creating social equality through infrastructure and access. But ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent privatization of space in the city, there have been many recurring urban issues worldwide, such as traffic, over-consumption and trash generation and resource overuse, each with an environmental impact.

So the idea of a ‘partizan’ re-emerges in this contemporary context of resistance and urban revolution. In Russian, the word means ‘guerrilla’ and the idea we promote is resistance to this form of urban development and engage people in the processes shaping their cities – advocating a sense of creative responsibility. With it, we are seeking to promote a new ideal and a new vision for cities – constructed by and for people, based on their explicit involvement and dialogues. Our work straddles the worlds of art and urbanism: we work in the city and with the public but use artistic venues as just one forum for sharing our ideas.

Partizaning: Participatory Urban Re-planning

The DIY mobile discussion platform to activate abandoned railway tracks in the city. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

The website Partizaning emerged at the end of 2011 as an online project documenting examples of urban interaction and participation, whether social, political, environmental or anything else. Meant to inspire people, we show examples of projects in the public realm as creative achievements of social transformation through DIY and participatory actions. The site is managed by an interdisciplinary group of artists and researchers in two languages, because we realized that the project resonates, not only in Russia but as an idea taking root in cities around the world. So we document projects and people who work with the language of art to transform urban contexts worldwide.

A Public mailbox which we installed in Troparevo Nikulino. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

Part of our goal is to reorient the city around people and their goals and ways of life, rather than around expertise and bureaucracy. We recognize the important role of creativity as commentary and suggestion, while advocating people’s involvement, because residents know the city best and sometimes just need the tools to participate, or to express or converse ideas about it. The problem with how cities have developed is that they are perceived as places of work instead of sites of play and living. If you think of the city as an extension of your home, it is different. You are more willing to plant trees, to clean up trash, to decorate it, to repair it. But this is not an idea that is widely held – people are generally confined to their homes, their cars, and are restricted in public space. Partizaning proposes the idea that unsanctioned repairs and improvements can collectively help to re-create a better city. We have done things like made DIY benches, painted crosswalks and created maps and signs that promote an alternate trajectory for the city.

Scans of the mail received during the Cooperative Urbanism project. (Image (c) Partizaning)

We are motivated by a conflation of art and urbanism and are inspired by the role of the Situationists and of street art and urban interventions which fall into the realm of revolutionary urban and social activism. In Russia and internationally, we engage in participatory processes based on research and culminating in interventions in public space. We think of these interventions more as a process and dialogue. Apart from projects, we try to promote creative grassroots urbanism and participation by giving lectures, presentations and conducting workshops in various cities. We also try to produce a bulletin which is occasionally printed as another format for people to interact with some of our ideas.

Cooperative Urbanism

Public surveys in Amsterdam during the Kunstvlaai Festival. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

In 2012, we did a project based on installing Public Mailboxes in outlying districts of Moscow. An experiment in the idea of collaboration and in the concept of cooperation in the city, we tried to get people to communicate their urban challenges and desires by leaving us anonymous mail. Our goal was to work with the idea of how people could reorganize their city from the bottom up and engage in processes that are generally impenetrable. What we found was that creating unsanctioned and unwatched forums in public space involved children and the elderly, who had varied and different suggestions and ways of using the mailboxes. As part of this project, the mail was scanned and shared with participating municipal authorities who could respond to people’s concerns – but the other part of the project was to encourage people to be the agents of urban change in their own neighbourhoods, particularly if they already knew the problem.

What Should Happen to Sint Nicolaas Lyceum?

In Amsterdam, as part of the Kunstvlaai Festival, we put up large format posters surveying residents in the district under transformation for insights about a building that was going to be demolished. We found people to be apathetic about future changes in their city and wanted to facilitate a public dialogue. This is another way in which we have sought to promote the idea of urban participation in varied contexts.

We are interested in how to facilitate and moderate user-oriented cities, promoting the belief that residents know best what they need and how they should behave in a moderated dialogue with other activists and experts. But one of the concerns and challenges we faces is truly involving overlooked and minorities in the city – voices that remain unheard and invisible, but are part of the urban fabric. In cities like St. Petersburg, Moscow, Amsterdam and Dusseldorf we find that our projects are invariably used by voices that don’t have forums for expression – or become taken over by those who seek to control the socially unaccepted.

Ultimately, as researchers, artists and urbanists, we find ourselves trying to use the language of art as a tool for inquiry to understand urban processes and facilitate a form of participation based on art and ideas of inclusion. To what extent we are successful can be debated, but as an experiment we believe that art in the city has a right to public space and interaction in the same way all urban residents do.

Shriya Malhotra is an urban researcher and intervention artist based in Moscow with Partizaning . She has an MA in Cities and Urbanization from the New School and collaborates on participatory art and process based projects that highlight the unseen or unusual aspects about cities and urban life.

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Address to Students at Moscow State University Ronald Reagan

A speech delivered May 31, 1988. As the Cold War ends, President Reagan inspires Russian students by delineating the importance of various kinds of freedom to a society undergoing remarkable reform.

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